La Jolla Music Society SummerFest 2012

Perhaps it’s inevitable that the most moving portion of Tan Dun’s monumental “Water Passion After St. Matthew” is the very end, when the chorus and soloists have stopped singing, the violinist and cellist have ceased playing, the percussionists are nearly motionless, and the composer (who is also the conductor) has left the front of the stage and joined the musicians at large, illuminated bowls filled with water.

As the lights dimmed, what you mostly heard was the sound of water. And as is the nature of all things, that sound ultimately faded to silence.

Then more silence; perhaps 10 or 15 seconds of silence, before the lights came up and the audience that filled the La Jolla Playhouse Saturday for its first collaboration with the La Jolla Music Society’s SummerFest burst into applause.

We could find that sound of water and that stillness in our own lives every day if we bothered to listen, but maybe it takes something like Tan’s ambitious, 90-minute, Bach-inspired work to get us there.

Water is one of Christianity’s central symbols, from the water used to initiate the faithful into the church to the “holy water” sprinkled on the dearly departed in the Roman Catholic Church.

But water has an even more elemental status as the element not only necessary to sustain life, but as the very substance of much of the body itself.

As he surveys the life of Jesus, much as Bach did in the “St. Matthew Passion,” Dun searches for resonance with water’s most elemental aspects. Where Bach reached for the skies in recounting the familiar story of Christ’s baptism, the last supper, his death and resurrection, Dun looks toward the earth.

Dun’s quest was more hindered than helped by SummerFest presenting the work in a theater. The Playhouse was able to effectively showcase the visual and dramatic aspects of Dun’s work, which specifies that the stage be set with 17 illuminated water bowls forming the shape of a cross. A percussionist is at each of the crosses’ three ends, and the conductor is at the fourth end, facing the other musicians and the chorus, which is divided in half by the cross.

Unfortunately, the Playhouse’s dry acoustics forced an increased reliance on the amplification. While that had the potential of allowing greater musical clarity and better control of the balance, violinist Cho-Liang Lin and cellist Felix Fan were consistently covered up in numerous ensemble passages by whomever was doing the sound mix. Even the more subtle water sounds were lost at certain critical points.

It also would have been helpful if Tan’s evocative music, which is informed by a remarkably broad range of vocal and instrumental sources and techniques, had room in which to expand and then fade away, as it would in a reverberant concert hall or a church. The reverb electronically added to the amplified sound just wasn’t the same.

Nevertheless, a superb, well prepared San Diego Master Chorale, the fiercely committed Lin and Fan, the exacting percussionists David Cossin, Dustin Donahue and Bonnie Whiting Smith, and expert vocal soloists Ying Huang and Stephen Bryant, made Dun’s often disturbing, at times depressing journey an ultimately rewarding one.

In the gospel according to Dun, it’s not really about ashes to ashes or dust to dust; it’s about water to water.